One of the core challenges facing the television and home video-oriented advertising industry was created when home videocassette recorders first appeared and allowed viewers to “time shift” and record programming to a storage medium for viewing after the original broadcasts, with the added ability to “fast-forward” or advance the recordings at speed higher than normal playing speed. The fast-forward capability allowed viewers to bypass, or at least gloss, over advertisements, which tremendously de-valued the advertisement inventory with respect to television and home video. This challenge has been exacerbated by the advent and popularity of the digital video recorder (DVR), a commonly-encountered electronic device with its advanced recording and video manipulation capabilities, capable of recording video in a digital format to a disk drive, flash drive, memory card, or a local or networked mass storage device.
With the growing features and capabilities of DVRs, smart televisions, smartphones, tablets, and other computing devices, as well as exponentially increasing streaming media and video-on-demand offerings, users are increasingly utilizing such devices and services to partake of video content. Commercials are easily skippable on DVRs and these other devices by fast forwarding through them and, in so doing, the viewer at most will perceive a logo or some other snippet of information, but certainly no brand message. The only industry response so far is to allow viewers to skip to the end of a “pre-roll” type of initial advertisement or content after watching so many seconds of it. Providers of supplemental content such as visual advertisers, as well as those offering advertising space and looking for new sources of inventory, thus need a video content format which is perceptible even in a fast-forwarded mode, while remaining customer-centric and not off-putting to the viewing consumer.